Kobie Fuller

Upfront Ventures
Partner

Kobie is a Partner at Upfront. He joined the firm in June 2016 after having previously worked at Silicon Valley­ based Accel, where he was involved in investments including Campaign Monitor, UserTesting, AdRoll, Emergent VR and Invoca (also an Upfront portfolio company). Prior to Accel, Kobie was the Chief Marketing Officer at REVOLVE, one of the largest global fashion e­commerce players based in Los Angeles.

Kobie brings to Upfront expertise in SaaS businesses and marketing technologies and is an author of Growthverse, an interactive visualization of the marketing technology landscape. He has deep knowledge of emerging technologies including VR and AR and was also an early personal investor in Oculus, later sold to Facebook for $2B. Earlier in his career, Kobie helped found OpenView Venture Partners and was an investor at Insight Venture Partners where he sourced notable early investments in Exact Target (acquired by Salesforce for $2.5B) and Instructure (NYSE: INST).

Meet Kobie at:

Panel: Voice Computing and the Rise of ServiceDate/Time: 3:45 PM

Though Apple’s virtual assistant Siri may be approaching its sixth birthday, innovation in voice computing in 2017 has been driven by Amazon’s two-year-old Echo, and its voice operating system Alexa, for which brands, agencies and other third parties can create “Skills” to engage this rapidly growing user base. And with the recent debuts of the Echo Look and Echo Show, Alexa’s scope now includes the camera, too, as well as the microphone. How are early adopters innovating on the Alexa platform? What have they learned from trials with Alexa Skills? How does camera functionality enhance what third parties can do? Further afield, does the rise of virtual assistants come at the expense of other media? Why search for products and services when virtual assistants can provide service based on preferences?